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National Digital Newspaper Program | Office of Secretary of State

From Brian Zylstra, deputy communications director/legislative liaison, Office of Secretary of State

We just did a blog post (link is below) about our State Library’s involvement with the National Digital Newspaper Program. The State Library has participated since 2008 and will continue to work on the program through 2014. So far, Washington has contributed 23 newspaper titles from its large microfilm collection, and continues to add more. These issues are full-text searchable and downloadable for free online at the Library of Congress by looking here.

Early this fall, Shawn Schollmeyer, who heads up our State Library’s newspaper digitizing program, went back to Washington, D.C., to attend meetings at the NEH offices and Library of Congress and to interact with program contacts. Shawn (pictured between Library of Congress staffers Chris Ehrman on the left and Robin Butterhof) wrote most of this recent State Library blog post that offers a behind-the-scenes look at what makes the newspaper digitization program a success.

In addition to this project, our State Library has created an online collection of newspapers beginning in 1852, which covers Washington’s territorial and early statehood periods. These digitized pages from our microfilm collection have been indexed and are keyword searchable thanks to the efforts of volunteers.

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